A group of five adolescent friends living in a housing development in a small French provincial town decides to enter an abandoned house: the experience will be the starting point of a nightmare that will change their lives. This is the premise that floats on the surface of the plot of La nit devastada, the first novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) that we can read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Oriol Vaqué for Proa. Behind this horror premise lie family conflicts, abuse, and disappointments, but also the discovery of desire and the strength of friendship. After establishing himself before the age of 30 thanks to Una educación libertina (2008) and La sal (2010), both in Spanish published by Cabaret Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo once again focuses on the chiaroscuro of intimacy and social inequalities through a powerful story that pays homage to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven with a powerful, rich, and sensory literary style.

The passage of time has not diminished the shyness of Jean Echenoz, but it has not managed to turn him into a cynical or disenchanted author. Born in Orange in 1947, the French writer has been one of the headliners of this year's Mot festival, but before that he passed through Barcelona with a new book in hand. Bristol (Raig Verd, 2026; translation by Anna Casassas) narrates decisive months in the life of Robert Bristol, a film director who is finishing the shoot of his latest film. It features effervescent, established, and semi-retired actresses, a solicitous but inconstant lover, an inspired policeman, a blackmailing general from South Africa, a bestselling author living in a palace, and a long list of supporting characters, human and animal, who further expand Echenoz's universe. The usual taste for details, the author's undeniable skill, and a sense of humor more subtle than our times make Bristol a pleasant and recommendable reading experience.

The death of the mother of French writer Emmanuel Carrère It had to culminate in a book. The inevitable recollection of the past that accompanies the death of a parent was the lever that propelled him, once he had digested the highly sensitive material, to write the mixture of chronicle and family autobiography that is KolkhozA book full of surprising relatives—Carrère has a cousin who is the president of Georgia!—and in which he himself would be like a kind of first cousin ofA Russian novel and of Limonov, two of the peaks of Carrère's work. With a translation by Ferran Ràfols Gesa that sounds wonderful, Kolkhoz It revisits Russian themes and even brings back some of the characters from those books, but it plays on different ground, that of family history linked to the history of the 20th century: can the description of a private room tell of a historical shift? In the land of Georges Duby, the answer is "of course," and Carrère proves it beyond a doubt.

Jezebela novel that Irène Némirovsky (kyiv, 1903-Auschwitz, 1942), published in 1936, begins with the trial of an older, "extremely wealthy" and pretentious woman, Gladys Eysenach, accused of murdering her lover of twenty years. Throughout the first chapter, which essentially serves as a prologue, we witness the reconstruction of the crime scene through the interrogation of the accused and a large gallery of witnesses. Written almost like a Hollywood screenplay—with sharp, snappy dialogue, secrets revealed, worldliness, mystery, and drama—this prologue unfolds before the reader all the ingredients of what appears to be a passionate melodrama. We discover, because she herself has confessed, that the wealthy, elegant, and cosmopolitan Eysenach did indeed commit the crime. And we believe we also know her motivations: jealousy, spite, and mad love. However, after the prologue, the novel flashes back and proceeds to reconstruct the protagonist's life from her earliest youth. What we end up discovering is far worse than we imagined.

We know Vanessa Springora on the impact of her first book, Consent (published in French in 2020 and in Catalan in 2021). The volume narrates her seduction by the writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was a teenager. She was in love, her mother consented to the relationship (hence the title), and he was a known pedophilia propagandist. In the absence of her father, living with her estranged mother, Springora fell prey to a collector of young girls—and young boys—who didn't hesitate to turn many of her literary works into apologetics for pedophilia.

Emmanuel Bove (1894-1945) was originally named Emmanuel Bobovnikoff and was the son of a Russian-Jewish father and a Luxembourgish maid. He lived a hectic life, between cheap boarding houses and shabby hotels, lung disease, and financial hardship. In 1924, the writer Colette published his first book, which is now available in Catalan thanks to a brilliant translation by Josep Alemany. My friends It is a perfect example of Bove's talent, a "secret" writer, highly recommended among writers, who has not made much fortune below the Pyrenees. Patrick Modiano, although Bove lacks the fog that surrounds the French Nobel Prize winner's characters, but rather the melancholy and sadness in the background. Everything is cleaner and clearer, rawer and more concise: "Before each customer there was a bottle and a glass. Music could have been made with a knife."